What Happened To Flynn

by Pat Muir

  “My client believes that the tent and its contents had been abandoned. At best, you may only charge him for petty theft, a misdemeanor. Also, Mr. Dollar is willing to make restitution to the owner if you are unable to recover the fishing rods.”

  “I must recover them as evidence.”

  Moorish changed the subject. “Ms. Notfarg, what have you done to eliminate all other the nearby campers as suspects?”

  “Your clients are the obvious suspects for the reasons I have outlined. Having cash in their safe of that quantity, mostly in one-hundred-dollar bills, which roughly matches what the murdered man had on him, is very suspicious.”

  “Ms. Notfarg, you have not answered my question.”

  “We have eliminated all other suspects except one couple we are still investigating.”

  “Hm. I understand you are acting here in the investigation of a missing person. If there was a murder, and you allege it took place at the fishing camp, then Sonoma County would have jurisdiction. At this point in time, you do not have a body, only the suspicion that a murder took place. Mr. Flynn might have decided to take a long vacation, and the blood in the car may have come from a minor injury. In addition, the alleged theft of fishing rods took place in Sonoma County, so you, a San Diego detective, cannot cite or arrest my clients on that matter.” Moorish looked at me as though expecting me to rebut him. I said nothing, and he continued. “Given that you do not have jurisdiction on the matter, I want my clients released and their funds returned to them.”

  I told him I would first discuss the matter with the Sonoma County sheriff and left him to phone Angie Haigh, with Steve listening in. I gave her a synopsis of the interviews and told her about the money we had found in Dollar’s safe. “That cash is certainly suspicious,” Angie commented, “but leaving a dead body in the car and driving it around the next day is very unlikely.”

  “I agree. It would help if you would have a detective interview Johnson’s mother in person to see if that alibi holds up.”

  Angie said she would arrange that before stating, “The case against the two of them isn’t strong enough for us to take it over. If you find Flynn’s fingerprints inside Dollar’s van or on that bundle of cash, the case becomes much stronger. I think you should let them both go while you develop more evidence and work on eliminating that Mason couple.”

  We returned to Moorish and told him the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office had recommended the release of his clients. I told him Dollar’s cash would be returned only after forensics had examined it. Johnson and Dollar were then brought back into the room, and Moorish spoke to them. I then formally unarrested them under section 859B of the legal code.

  Dollar said, his voice raised in anger, “So, when am I going to get my damned money back?”

  “Forensics is to examine it; that should probably take about two weeks,” I replied. Dollar appeared startled at my reply and complained no further.

  Moorish gave me a sheet of paper on which Alisha had written down alibi-supporting data. I told him we would work on that data and get back to him. Steve drove back to San Diego while I stayed to see if I could recover the fishing rods. I phoned the Craigslist purchaser, and a woman responded. I explained I was a detective from San Diego investigating a missing person whose fishing rods had been stolen.

  The woman sounded scared. “I told Tommy that it was a mistake to buy those rods, but he said it was such a good deal. I’ll have him call you as soon as he gets home, around ten p.m.”

  I gave her my cell phone number and drove to my hotel in Lakewood, since I did not want to drive back to San Diego that late at night. The motel had a small gym, so I put on running shorts and a sports bra and hopped on a treadmill.

  A good day, I thought as I jogged at my usual pace. The case had moved along. I had questioned two possible murder suspects in possession of unexplained cash. The Carson sheriff area detective suggested it might be illicit drug money and planned to contact the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to see if they had any leads on Dollar as a distributor. If they had such leads, then they would partner with the DEA in the confiscation of those funds. In my mind, I went through other possible suspects. I reckoned that it might take two persons to silently overcome Flynn, a man in good physical shape. In addition, I could only consider campers who’d left just before or just after Flynn’s car had left the camping site. In my mind, I went through Tom Small’s list again. If Dollar and Johnson were eliminated, that only left Mason, on whom I had almost zero information. Tommy, the purchaser of the stolen fishing rods, called, and I had him bring the fishing rods to me at the motel.

  In the morning, I went to the Carson Sheriff office to get Dollar’s cash from the evidence room. I ran into considerable resistance there. They had been instructed not to release it to me. I had to call Sergeant Thompson and Robert Neill to convince them to release the funds as evidence in a murder case. They demanded I sign a conditional receipt that the funds were to be returned to them after forensic examination if the murder charge was dropped. I had no interest in being Dollar’s advocate for the return of those funds. As a courtesy to a true legal professional, I telephoned Roger Moorish and explained the Carson office claim.

  Back in San Diego, I went straight to the forensics department and dropped off Dollar’s cash and Flynn’s fishing rods. I asked the forensic technician to check for blood and fingerprints on the rods. I was very curious to see if Alisha Johnson’s prints were on the fishing rods. If they were, it meant she was an accessory in their theft and a liar, since she had claimed no involvement. Danny Chu came out of his office with a stack of papers in his hand.

  “I looked over Flynn’s computer and found a whole bunch of letters he had written to his mother,” he said. “I thought you might be interested in them.”

  “I received copies from the nursing home, “I replied, “so I don’t need to read them.” I paused. “Why didn’t I see them when I looked through Flynn’s computer, though?”

  “Because they were not written in the most frequently used software, Word,” replied Danny. “They were written with WordPerfect software instead, which had somehow become corrupted.” He waved his hand at me. “I also found this letter written with that software, which you will find far more important.” He handed it to me.

  Flynn had written a letter to the DEA in which he claimed that Larry Swift was a money launderer. He said he had been jogging in the Palomar Park around eight o’clock as part of his daily exercise when he saw the manager, Bert Swanson, enter a vacant mobile home, one that he, Flynn, had listed for sale. He was surprised at this action so early in the morning, but he didn’t wait to see Bert exit the home.

  He thought as he jogged that perhaps Bert had a customer who had inquired about some interior aspect of the unit not described in the listing. Perhaps he could help. After completing his run, he stopped at the park office, not normally open at that time, but open that day. Flynn entered and, with no receptionist present, found Swanson in the back office taking out money from a plastic bag containing a huge stack of cash. Both stared at each other. Swanson finally muttered that he had a customer who wanted to buy a home for cash and he was counting out the funds. “Was that for my listing?” asked Flynn, “and was that why you went inside it so early this morning?” Swanson muttered that the customer and the home he wanted were none of Flynn’s business. Swanson got up and escorted Flynn out of the office, and then locked himself inside. The incident took place on September 5, 2008. The letter was dated Wednesday, September 10, four days before Flynn had left for the Russian River fishing camp.

  “Wow! This does put a whole new light on things,” I told Danny. “This is so important that I’m taking it to Sergeant Thompson right away.”

  Thompson was busy talking in a closed office to somebody else, so an hour passed before I was able to see him. I briefed him on the progress on the missing Flynn case and then produced the dead man’s letter.

  After he read it, he said, “Do you think
this is a genuine complaint or merely sour grapes, given that Larry Swift took his wife and denied him access to that little girl, Sally?”

  I told him I didn’t know but that we should talk to the DEA, to whom the letter was addressed.

  “There may be a lot of assets we can seize if there is indeed money laundering,” Thompson remarked. “I’ll get in touch with the DEA and get back to you.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Danny called me a day later. “I’ve looked at fingerprints on the damaged gas connector you recovered from the waste bin in Flynn’s shed. In addition to Flynn’s and Mrs. Smith’s fingerprints, I found a partial thumbprint that, with a seventy percent confidence factor, matched the prints of a Joseph Bailey, a felon with a history.”

  My head shot up at the news, and a “Wow!” came out of my mouth. “This certainly puts a new light on things!” I exclaimed.

  I began to speculate. Perhaps that had been no accident. Perhaps Bailey had been ordered to kill Flynn by exploding his mobile home. What a disaster that would have been. It could have injured many of the neighbors had there been an explosion. It displayed callousness for life I found unsettling. I pulled Bailey’s file from the criminal record base. The man had been in and out of prison for half of his adult years. Assault, drug dealing, and extortion had all been charged against him. In many cases, he had not been convicted. Intimidated witnesses and corrupted jury members, leading to hung juries, had been suspected. Bailey was also suspected of killing two men believed to be drug dealers. I looked at his photograph, taken ten years earlier, the last time he had been charged. It showed a big, heavily built man with dark hair and a scowl on his face. I promptly telephoned Mrs. Brown of site R2 and told her I would be visiting her next morning at her home in Riverside, a town one hundred miles north of our office. I prepared a photo mug shot array that included the ten-year-old one of Bailey and prepared for my trip.

  I left my home at seven a.m. the next morning and drove to Riverside up Highway 15, thankful the heavy traffic was in the reverse direction. Mrs. Brown’s home, a house built in the early sixties to accommodate overflow from Los Angeles, lay in a suburb of the town. Its front was comprised of a flat bed of yellow stones interspersed with cacti, perfect for minimal water use and minimal gardening by the elderly owners of the home. I was welcomed by Mrs. Brown, a woman of seventy with short white hair, whose quick steps and demeanor told me who wore the pants in her family. She offered me coffee after introducing her husband, an even older man who constantly deferred to his wife. I pulled the mug shot lineup from my briefcase and sipped my coffee, asking the couple to look at the photos carefully. “I think it’s number five,” said Mrs. Brown, pointing to Bailey’s photo. Her husband concurred.

  Not the best confirmation of identity. “Think?” I asked.

  “It certainly looks like him,” said my hostess, “but your picture shows a much younger man. I don’t think I would want to swear that he was the one in court.”

  I’ll need to do the photo lineup with other campers to get an identification of Bailey that can face challenge. I did not press them further but asked if they could remember anything about Bailey’s companion or the car they were driving. They described Bailey’s companion, Mason, with a little more detail than before—a stocky man with the build of a weightlifter, about seventy inches tall, in his mid-thirties, with reddish-blonde hair. He had a small mustache and had been wearing sunglasses on the two occasions they’d seen him.

  When I returned to the office, I called Angie Haigh in Sonoma and arranged for her office to show the mug shot array to the Wellhouses, who lived in nearby San Francisco. I also asked her to check with Celeste Wellhouse to see if she’d seen Alisha Johnson that Monday or Tuesday. The next day, I visited William Watson again for the same purpose. He gave me a tentative identification of Bailey from the mug shot array but could not remember seeing Alisha that Monday or Tuesday.

  Thompson informed me he had set up a meeting with the DEA office on Monday at ten o’clock. He told me to bring all my notes on the case and be prepared to answer any questions they might have. He said Steve was to come as well since he had participated in the interview of Dollar and Johnson. I didn’t think Steve’s presence was necessary and saw it more as mere favoritism. I certainly didn’t want Steve to take over my case.

  I went home that Friday thinking that the investigation of the missing man had made significant progress. We had found Flynn’s car. We had ascertained it had contained his dead body. We had suspects for his murder. We had found two motivations for his killing—theft of his cash and eliminating him as a witness. Lots of questions remained. Was the claimed visit to Johnson’s mother in Oakland truthful? Could we find witnesses to Johnson being together with Dollar on the Tuesday, since that would eliminate them as suspects? Why was Bill fearful about the examination of his cash? Who were the Mason couple who’d taken the space that Flynn had booked? Was one of them really the murderous Bailey, and had they been sent to kill Flynn? If that were the case, then how had they conducted the murder given they had left the camp after Dollar and Johnson? Were these two couples possibly in cahoots with each other? I had lots of work to do to answer these questions. I just wished I knew when the missing man’s car had been dumped in Compton.

  The DEA office is located in downtown San Diego, about six miles from our CID office. We parked our car in courthouse space reserved for law enforcement officers. I pitied the poor witnesses and litigants who had to park in private parking lots at fees of fourteen dollars for a minimum of ten hours. I remarked that parking costs were outrageous. Thompson told me that the parking costs and shortages were due in part to a misguided city council decision in the seventies to not demand from developers adequate underground parking for their tenants. The idea had been to encourage people to use public transportation. But then the council had done little to increase public transportation proportionately.

  “You think that cost is outrageous,” he added, “wait till you go to central New York City, where they’ll charge you that much for just an hour.”

  We bypassed security at the DEA office and were ushered into a conference room where sat a forty-year old man dressed in a gray suit with a noticeable bright-blue tie. He stood up and introduced himself as Drew Ryan, an assistant to his boss, Joseph Jackson, who was finishing up another meeting. Drew asked if we would like coffee. We both declined. We made small talk about the San Diego weather, the absence of rain, and local politics for ten minutes, until Drew’s boss walked into the room.

  “My name is Joseph Jackson,” he said in a booming New Jersey-accented voice that spoke of authority. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he added as he shook our hands.

  Actually, he squeezed our hands very tightly, and both Steve and I winced. I have met other men who have crushing grips and do so to show masculinity and control. It does not impress me. When he asked if we had been offered coffee, I made my point by saying tartly, “I couldn’t hold a cup now after that grip.”

  Drew Ryan winked at me. Steve smiled. My remark did not seem to faze Jackson, a large, sixty-year old white man, well over six feet tall, with a protruding belly. Instead, he focused his words on Thompson. “I want to let you know our take on the letter your Mr. Flynn wrote us. Drew here will tell you about it.”

  Drew said, “We tried phoning Flynn right after we got the letter but could not make contact. I then went to his mobile home, but he was not there. Nor was there a car in his driveway. I then went to the park manager’s office and talked to…” He looked at his notes. “Bert Swanson, the man Flynn stated was counting a large quantity of cash. Swanson said Flynn was paranoid, overcome with rage and jealousy at being divorced by his wife, who was now living with the owner of the park, Larry Swift, who happened to be Swanson’s nephew. He said he knew Flynn had been made to pay alimony and had complained to several people about the unfairness of it all and had said he would get his revenge on Swift. He said he had no idea where Flynn had gone. The notion that Flynn had
caught him counting a large quantity of money was pure fabrication.”

  “Did you talk to Flynn’s immediate neighbor?” I asked. “She knew where Flynn had gone.”

  “I tried to,” replied Drew, “but there was nobody home there either. There was no car in the adjacent driveway. I left my business card on the doors of both homes. I never got a call back.” He paused. “I then turned my gaze on Mr. Swift. He is well known in the community, being on various charity boards, and is the owner of several well-established businesses with good reputations affirmed by the Better Business Bureau. He has a stellar reputation and no criminal or even misdemeanor record. I looked at the family court judgment of the Holmes divorce. It showed Flynn having to pay twelve hundred dollars alimony per month to his ex-wife and not being allowed to visit Marge Holmes’s daughter. I interviewed Mr. Swift, who said he could understand why Mr. Flynn would be distraught. He said the man had become very attached to the little girl, Sally, and had expressed anger at not being given visitation rights. I and Mr. Jackson concluded the letter had been written out of spite, one of the many we get in this office.” He nodded his head, indicating he had finished. As he spoke, I kept thinking how odd it was that Swift had not mentioned this prior DEA interview to me.

  Jackson then said, “We are very interested in what you can bring to the table.”

  Thompson motioned me to speak. I told Jackson and Ryan that Flynn had gone missing at the Russian River camp and that his abandoned car had been found stripped in Compton. I told them forensics had analyzed residues in the trunk of that vehicle and concluded it had contained a dead body whose DNA matched that of the missing man. Thompson and Ryan interrupted me during this briefing to ask for supporting details.

  “We have detained and questioned two nearby campers who had cash roughly matching what the dead man had on him. We are still examining that cash for DNA and fingerprints. They claim they could not have done the murder, since Flynn’s car left a day before they did.”